Scope custom fields to one project

Some fields only make sense inside one project. An “Acceptance Criteria” field belongs on a delivery project’s tasks, not on every task in the company. Project-scoped custom fields solve this: they behave exactly like organization-wide custom fields, but only that one project ever sees them.

Who can create them

Project Owners and Managers can create fields for their own project, without involving an organization admin. Org admins can manage them too. This is the key difference from organization-wide fields, which need the organization-level permission: scoping the blast radius to one project means the project’s own managers can be trusted with the decision.

Create a project-scoped field

1. Open the project, go to the Settings section, and select the Fields tab. It lists the task fields scoped to just this project.

2. Select the add-field button, name the field, and pick its type. For Dropdown and Multi-select types, enter the options, one per line.

3. Save. The field now appears on this project’s tasks and as an available column in this project’s Grid view, and nowhere else.

In the Grid view’s column picker, fields are grouped under two headings so you can always tell which is which: organization fields, available across every project, and project fields, scoped to this one.

Promote a field to organization-wide

When a project-scoped field proves broadly useful, an organization admin can promote it from the same Fields tab using Promote to org-wide. After promotion the field appears on every project’s forms and Grid, and every value already entered stays attached.

Promotion is deliberately admin-only, even though project managers can create the field in the first place: making a field visible everywhere is an organization-level decision.

Note

Imported Microsoft Project plans follow the same philosophy. Custom columns from an imported file arrive as project-scoped fields on the imported project, so one import never pollutes every other project’s Grid with its columns. Promote the ones worth keeping.

FAQs

Can I edit everything about a field from the project’s Fields tab? The project-level manager is intentionally lean: name, type, and options. If a field needs the full editing surface (description, default value, required flag), promote it to org-wide and manage it in Organization Settings.

Can I delete a project-scoped field? Yes, as long as no values have been entered against it. Once tasks carry values, deletion is blocked so data cannot be silently destroyed.

What happens to the data when a field is promoted? Nothing is lost. Values bind to the field itself, not to its scope, so everything entered while the field was project-scoped remains attached and visible after promotion.